The black arts

Sometimes in life it is what you don't properly see, what you cannot properly hear or that you cannot fathom that disturbs or actually frightens you the most. We get half a story, a whisper or a fleeting glimpse and our mind will fill in the blanks, envisioning to "us" what "it" want's. Indeed, without such a facility to fashion images to our consciousness, human sight would be very stressful indeed, as scientific investigation and those unfortunate to suffering anomalies of the mind have testified. Take theses few images as vey simple examples.

We know this is a motionless picture, but you try telling that to your mind. It's trying to deliver a sensible picture to "you", based in its life of experiences, but it can't decide, so you may be seeing the beads move, but even using one eye alone, many people will perceive two central troughs in what you know is just a flat picture.

This picture is flat but your brain has probably decide you are looking at a distant, probably moving, circular pattern through a patterned card with a hole in it. The change in the scale of the outer patterns suggest depth, the fuzz circles imply great distance, so your brain falls back on its rules of sight and gives you the impression you are no doubt experiencing now. Intriguingly I tried this on a friend and their experience was different to mine; that the card held a magnifying lens held over a spotty background. 

Here's a good one of the nurse Florence Nightingale,

 best revealed by moving the image around with your eyes fixed in a stare.

Wiggle image to see Vincent Van Gough

Watch this YouTube video and be amazed at how your brain messes with what you see, as does this one

Anyway, I think we are at a point of attention when I can tell you of my personal interest. I asked myself the question , "If your mind fills in bits, how will a picture change if you slowly remove or alter bits of it, thereby forcing your mind to add its bits to give it's meaning of what your eye is seeing?" 

After fiddling about with images I realised your mind is pretty quick at spotting what is missing and doesn't seem to make up anything of its own, but that if you darken an image, or bits of it to a point of abstraction, you brain starts to add or interpret until it is satisfied the "message" to you makes sense.

Try these 

Old man or chimpanzee? (Zoom in for clarification)

Facing you (left knee higher than the other) or not? - Zoom in.

Hard - A doll, a ghost or a child? - Zoom in (in a dark room)